Sounds more like just closing a loophole.
This is not about early access, where you buy an unfinished game that may never be completed. Advanced Access is the fairly uncommon offering where buying some sort of special edition gives you access to the full, complete game a few days before official release.
Advanced Access is time spent with the finished, release-state game. There was no reason for this to have not been counted before.
Problem is that it's usually not a finished game. The old way at least gave stupid players a way to punish bad publishers.
This is a bad move for the customers.
It's as finished as the game is going to be at launch, this isn't "Early Access" where the game is still evolving. You can talk all you want about how games are released unfinished these days, that's fine, but make no mistake. "Advanced Access" is the game as it will be on release day, with access granted a few days sooner. It is NOT still in active development as an unfinished product and is not going to see significant changes between the start of the Advanced Access period and public release.
Advanced access is playing the game in it's Launch Day state, and any rules for time played should be consistent between Advanced Access and official launch. Your first two hours in Advanced Access will be the same as the first two hours if you only started on launch day. It's the same game with the same refund rules, not your opportunity to red-eye your way through the whole game for a few days and still get an uncontested refund.
The "bad move" is a customer pre-ordering in the first place. We, as consumers, should know what's up by now.
I had no idea it wasn't counted towards the refund period previously.
Yeah. I think many didn't. It sounds like a clear loophole to me, and I don't think it's unfair to count that playtime towards the regular total.
Payday 3 worked fine for me before the full release overloaded the always online servers for weeks. It’s a funner game than payday 2 but always online is ridiculous. I don’t want developers to just get away with that in the future.
Playing a game for more than 2 hours doesn't mean you can't refund it anymore, it just means the refund isn't automatically accepted. If the quality suddenly drops on release day you can still request a refund.
Ah, sure. I never play online games so didn't really consider that. Still, it means the player takes a chance with advanced access. That's always the case, no? I know the industry treats it like a perk, but I'd argue that's on the industry and not Valve's policy.
That shouldn't really affect anyone as we don't pre-order games anymore, right?
I wish this wasn't like this. Games should not be allowed to be "early access" for years on end. There should be a realistic linitation, because so many games are EA and then abandoned.
This isn't early access, it's advanced access, like if a game has a deluxe edition that lets people play a few days before the official release.
More like delayed release. Pay more to find all the day 1 bugs!
It's not actually about Early Access. It's about Advanced Access -- when you pre-purchase a game and get to play it before the official release as a perk.
Early Access games (=games where the dev knows it isn't done and puts it in Early Access) already had the same refund limits as regular games.
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